Recurring-Meetings

The meeting has been on your calendar for a year. You have stopped remembering why you joined. Nobody has asked you a question in it since spring, and you have started doing other work during it, badly. You cannot decline your way out of this. A calendar decline handles one Wednesday; the series has fifty more. And the silent version — quietly declining a recurring invite week after week — is the single most misread way to get out of a recurring meeting, because from the organiser’s side it looks identical to unreliability. ...

Most advice about declining meetings is written as though the only obstacle were finding the right words. Find the polite phrasing, send it, and the meeting goes away. The words are the easy part. The hard part is that a decline is a small political act — you are telling someone their claim on you is worth less than something else — and it has a price. Usually a small one. Occasionally not. The advice that pretends otherwise is written by people who either have no manager or have not had one recently. ...

There are six types of work meetings, and every entry on your calendar is doing one of those six jobs. Once you can name which, the question of whether to keep it stops being a matter of taste. The reason this is worth twenty minutes is that meetings get judged by how they feel. A meeting you enjoy gets defended; a meeting you dread gets targeted. Neither is a signal about whether it should exist. The status meeting you like because it is the only time you talk to that team is still a status meeting, and the review you dread may be the only thing preventing a quarterly disaster. ...

There is a whole category of web page that will multiply attendees by salaries and tell you a recurring meeting costs your company $47,000 a year. They are free, they are well built, and most of them exist to collect your email address. ...